Chapter 34
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
MEGAN: PRESENT
We left the building together at nine, which sounds unremarkable unless you know that I had never once left a building with anyone in ten years.
The lobby was empty except for the night guard, who wished Wyatt and me good evening and showed no reaction to the sight of the woman who owned twenty-two percent of the company walking out beside the man whose name was on the company. Good lobby staff are diplomats. Someone should tell them.
The December cold hit like a decision. We stood on the sidewalk in it, two people who had spent three hours saying ten years’ worth of baggage, suddenly confronted with the oldest logistical problem in the world.
“It’s late,” Wyatt said, in the tone of a man opening a negotiation he had no position in.
“It is.”
“You should eat something.” Then, catching himself—catching the decade of history in that statement, the fact that he had earned no right to say it yet—he amended, “I should eat something. You’d be welcome to supervise.”
I looked at him standing there in his good coat, hands in his pockets, thirty years old, running a company, negotiating for my company, and I watched the nerves rise beneath it all, exactly as they had once risen beneath a porch light, and something in me that had been clenched for ten years let go of one more notch.
“No restaurants,” I said. “Nothing with a hostess. I can’t sit across from you tonight at a table with a white tablecloth and pretend I still have table manners.”
The real smile. “Then I know a place with no tablecloths at all.”
We ate dollar slices standing at a counter on Seventh Avenue, still in our coats, the paper plates turning translucent with grease, surrounded by college kids and a man in a Santa hat having an intense phone call about drywall.
By any measure I trust, it was the best meal of my adult life.
“We never did this,” Wyatt said, folding his slice with the ease of a man who had not spent the past four months in boardrooms. “All those Thursdays. Coffee, libraries, and walking the long way. We never once just—ate badly while standing up.”
“We were still teenagers. We thought we had time to get to everything.”
It came out lighter than it had landed. He looked at me over the paper plate, and I watched him decide—deliberately, visibly—not to follow it down. We had already done the weight tonight. This was the other thing. We were both learning it in real time.
“For the record,” he said instead, “no company talk tonight. Nolan’s report will still be terrifying come morning.”
“Agreed.” I stole the crushed pepper from in front of him. “Though for the record, your head of analytics buries the lead. Page nine should have been page one.”
“That’s company talk.”
“That’s a performance review. Different genre.”
His quiet laugh. A girl two counters away glanced at him with the usual quick, involuntary assessment that strangers often made, and I realized that after ten years, my instinctive response had shifted, too.
It used to be a wall rising inside me. Now it’s just a calculation.
Yes, he looks like that, and he is folding pizza next to me on purpose.
I finished my slice. All of it, down to the crust I would have abandoned a year ago, without noticing until afterward that I had.
“I want to show you something,” I said on the sidewalk. Instead of putting him in a cab, I walked him two blocks south to my office building and badged us through the after-hours entrance while he asked no questions, which was its own kind of fluency.
The freight elevator. The service corridor on forty-six. The gray door with the alarm placard, which had been out of service since before my lease began, a fact I had confirmed with the building manager years earlier, for no reason I’d been willing to write down.
The roof.
Manhattan unfolded around us as it only does from a height it hasn’t authorized—the whole grid burning quietly in the cold, rivers black at the edges, the city’s entire argument laid out at once, the sound turned down.
Wyatt stood at the parapet, silent for a long moment. Then he realized what he was looking at. “This is the photograph.”
I turned. “What?”
“Your desktop. The skyline at night.” He kept his eyes on the city, giving me room to stay silent.
“I saw it on your screen the day of the disclosure meeting. I’ve seen a thousand skyline photos.
That one’s taken from an odd angle for a stock image, and the water towers were wrong for any block but this one. I’ve wondered since.”
Of course he had noticed. He had always noticed. Filed, observed, kept. It was infuriating at nineteen, and it was infuriating now. Ten years of practiced deflection stood up in my chest, offering me a dozen exits, but the doors were inexplicably locked.
“I took it the night I signed the lease,” I said.
“Three years ago. I came up here alone with a bottle of champagne I didn’t open, stood at this railing, and took a single photograph.
” The cold made the words take visible shape and fill the air, which felt right.
“I told myself it was about the skyline. A monument to the empire, admiring the view from the top. That’s the version I would have given anyone who asked. ”
“And the real version?”
“I stood up here and thought about home. My mother. My father, who never got to see any of it.” I watched the traffic move soundlessly forty-six floors below.
“And for about four seconds that I refused to enter into the log, I thought about you. Then I took the picture.” I forced myself to look at him.
“It’s been on my screen for three years.
Ten thousand hours of telling myself it was about the skyline. ”
He was quiet. When he turned from the city, his eyes were doing the thing they had done across a parking lot, an auditorium, and a boardroom, the thing that had never once changed in ten years.
“Thank you for the four seconds,” he said. Not a joke. Or not only.
“They were unauthorized.”
“They were load-bearing,” he said. “Mine were, too.”
The wind came off the river, and I shivered. He did not offer me his coat because he knew better. Instead, he did something with far fewer precedents: he held out his hand, palm up, the way you do for someone whose walls you have personally studied. An offer with all the exits left unlocked.
I took it.
We stood at the parapet, with the city running its ten million errands below us, indifferent and relentless. For once, I felt no need to keep up with it.
My apartment is four blocks from the office, on a floor my mother calls too high off the ground. For ten years, no one had ever been inside it except family, Camille, and a rotating cast of building superintendents.
He stood in the middle of my living room, hands in his pockets, looking around the way he looked at everything—thoroughly, without comment—at the clean lines, the empty surfaces, and the bookshelves arranged by a system only I could see. I waited, armored out of habit, for the observation.
“It’s quiet,” he finally said. “Your whole city is loud, and you built a quiet room at the top of it.” A beat. “It suits you. It’s the version of you people don’t get to see. I’m saying thank you, badly.”
“You’re saying it fine.”
I made tea neither of us drank. We sat on my couch like two people who had conducted hostile negotiations across mahogany for four months and had absolutely no protocol for cushions.
Then the protocol problem solved itself the old way, the original way, the way it had solved itself in a dorm doorway in October rain eleven years ago—gradually, and then not gradually at all.
For a while, neither of us said anything.
The silence felt different now—not awkward, not careful, but weighted with everything that had happened between us and everything that hadn’t.
Ten years of separate lives. Ten years of wrong assumptions, unfinished conversations, and moments that had seemed insignificant at the time but suddenly didn’t.
Wyatt sat close enough that I could see his outline in the blue-gray light from the windows, the lamp casting a warm edge along his jaw.
Close enough to feel the pull of him—steady, patient, gravitational, the pull he had been exerting across parking lots, auditoriums, and boardroom tables for eleven years without ever once turning it into pressure.
I thought about all the versions of us that had existed over the years. The people we’d become without each other. The choices we’d made. The distance that had somehow not become indifference.
That was the part I couldn’t get past. After everything, I still cared. Not abstractly. Not as a memory. Not as a lingering attachment to the past.
Him.
Here.
Now.
The realization settled over me in a strange mix of relief and terror. Wanting him had always been complicated, but being honest about it felt even more dangerous.
So I did the dangerous thing.
Eleven years ago, I watched this man start across forty yards of Savannah asphalt toward me, get turned around at the halfway mark, and file it as proof of the physics, then drive home, never once letting myself imagine the crossing finished.
Tonight the distance was fifteen inches of sofa.
And I finally understood what some patient part of me had maybe always known: it was mine.
The last distance was always going to be mine.
I crossed it.
The first contact of my lips on his was a question, and his response was consistent with how he approaches everything significant—by becoming completely still, with hands relaxed at his sides, allowing me to define the situation.
For a moment, he merely received it, and I sensed the restraint within him like a held-back current, ten years of desire stored and released repeatedly, as he waited for my signature.
I signed.
My hand found his jaw, the faint evening roughness of it, and the stillness broke.